HEFUU Director Prof. Erik Grönqvist presents research at IHEA Congress 2025
On July 21 and 23, 2025, HEFUU Director Prof. Erik Grönqvist gave two separate presentations on his current research at the International Health Economics Association Congress at Bali, Indonesia.
The first presentation titled Sick of Becoming a Parent: The Child Penalty on Parent’s Mental Ill-Health focused on how parenthood affects mothers’ and fathers’ mental health (antidepressant use and inpatient care for mental and behavioural disorders). Having a child is a major life course transition for parents entailing parenting stress, more binding time constraints and changed gender roles. The results suggest that becoming a parent impacts not only career trajectories, but also the risk of mental health problems both for men and women.
The second presentation by Prof. Grönqvist titled Should Willingness-to-Pay Thresholds Change with Disease Severity?, notes that health economic evaluation can inform policy makers about whether new medical treatments represent good value for money. However, because most people hold general preferences for equity, disease severity would also matter for welfare when prioritising. Professor Grönqvist discussed thedevelopment of a novel, yet very simple, way to calculate distributional weights for different levels of disease severity in monetary units, which enables an easy scaling of the ICER thresholds, and also presented results showing that the Swedish population not only values the amount of health created, but also how it is distributed.
Fakta
The IHEA congress, held every second year, is a global forum for health economists to engage around the latest methodological developments, present recent research findings and explore the implications of this research for health policy and practice. The IHEA congress includes presentations across the full spectrum of health economics’ fields.